One of the difficulties encountered by
those of us who like to go scratching around the Bible to background its
characters is that, just like in the phone directory, lots of different people have the same
name. That makes certainty an issue. Names like Mary, John and James appear all
over the place. Disambiguators help, of course, and the Holy Spirit provides them
here and there: Mary Magdalene, James the son of Alphaeus, and so on.
This morning I’m more than a little curious
about Heman the Ezrahite, the poet credited with the aforementioned “wintry
landscape”.
